Back in the early 1970s, the late Houston-based producer Huey P. Meaux invited a local deejay to SugarHill Recording Studios.

When the deejay's eye drifted to a bell sitting on a desk, Meaux identified it as the source of the ringing at very beginning of the hit song "Chantilly Lace," the sound made an instant before J.P. Richardson, aka the Big Bopper, blurted "Helloooo, baaaaaby!" The hit was recorded at SugarHill in 1958, back when it was Gold Star Studios, and released on the local D-Records.

"Our mandate is to try to broadcast the story of Houston," says Cecelia Ottenweller, the organization's co-chair. "To get stories out there. We pick a theme every year and try to bring history to the front."

Music, Ottenweller admits, proved a joyous challenge due to the diversity of styles that either emerged in this region, or that were modified here in a particular way. Blues, rhythm and blues, jazz, zydeco and hip-hop are just a few that will be threaded through the event.

"It's a history that has been quite obscured," she says. "Pretty much buried."

The ensuing tale is one of brilliance and idiocy, art and commerce, innovators and crooks.

Port city soundsAs a port city, "Houston shares a few special characteristics with other port cities," Ottenweller says. "One is transients. We exist because of economic opportunity. People don't come here for the fantastic landscape or the mild climate. Houston's draw is flat out opportunity."

The diversity a port city enjoys offers rewards in the variety of its culture. But a downside to a transient culture is its transience. The old bulldozed for the new.

And while Houston's museum district teems with riches, the city lacks a pan-cultural historical institution: The kind of place that would, could and should house something like the bell that rang at the beginning of "Chantilly Lace."

Rick Mitchell, a former Chronicle music critic is among the panelists and moderators speaking at the conference Saturday. "Houston, historically, has not been acknowledged for the influential role it has played in the development of America's music history," he says. "Particularly African-American music history. This was home to what was, at the time, the largest black-owned record label in the country. Houston ranks with Memphis, Chicago and New Orleans as one of the incubators of the blues and rhythm and blues."

Those cities have dedicated buildings or neighborhoods to their musical heritage. In Houston, there was no reference to the iconic Lightnin' Hopkins for visitors to see until a fan took the initiative to have a historical marker granted in 2010.

Port Arthur has its Museum of the Gulf Coast, home to a hall of fame that has enshrined native Janis Joplin, and other Gulf Coast icons like Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown and Lee Hazlewood. Down south in the Valley, San Benito built a local heritage museum with the late country star Freddy Fender as its cornerstone.

Smaller towns cultivate a different, more sentimental sort of civic pride. So many of these musicians had creative ties to Houston.

And while Austin has curated its reputation as "The Live Music Capital of the World," that designation is quaintly recent, birthed through counter-culture seeds planted in the 1960s that sprouted in the 1970s.

By comparison, influential 1920s blues players like pianists and composers George and Hersel Thomas and their sister Beulah "Sippie" Wallace were all from Houston. Blues singer and songwriter Victoria Spivey, a Houston native, penned the timeless standard "Black Snake Blues" in the '20s. They all left for cities with music industry infrastructure — labels and recording studios. Their departures would become a recurring theme in Houston music.

Influencing rockSome industry began to spring from the soil here around 1941 when Bill Quinn opened a recording studio.

The Quinn Recording Company, which transformed into Gold Star Studios, is where he recorded music for his Gold Star Records label. Lightnin' Hopkins recorded early sides for Quinn, and there fiddler Harry Choates cut "Jole Blon," the Cajun music standard that was also a charting pop hit.Harold W. "Pappy" Daily launched his Starday label in 1952, which would prove pivotal in country music, releasing early music by George Jones and Roger Miller.

And club owner Don Robey launched his Peacock Records label here in 1949, which produced a crucial recording in 1953: "Hound Dog," by Willie Mae "Big Mama" Thornton. Robey bought Duke Records in 1952 and ran a large and successful R&B, gospel and blues enterprise. His label and studio wasn't just notable for the hits it produced, which were iconic and many — most notably by Johnny Ace, Junior Parker and Bobby "Blue" Bland.

Photo: David Redfern, Redferns

Bobby 'Blue' Bland.

Bobby 'Blue' Bland.

Robey courted brilliant local talent — songwriters, arrangers and producers, instrumentalists — to make these recordings, building an in-house music machine that would be the model for record labels that have enjoyed greater renown like Motown and Stax.

Books, documentaries and museums have pulled the players from these other storied labels and studios from the shadows. But Duke/Peacock's musical family hasn't enjoyed the same delayed recognition.

Evelyn Johnson may be the greatest of the unknown music players in Houston's history. "Mother Superior" was Robey's business manager, and responsible for running his studio, label and the Buffalo Booking Agency. She also provided advice and support for those on the creative side.

"Those two — Don Robey and Evelyn Johnson — they did a lot for Houston," says singer, songwriter and producer Steve Tyrell, a Fifth Ward native. "When you think of the music they produced, especially Bobby "Blue" Bland, it had a huge influence on what would later become rock 'n' roll."

The Korean War interrupted the career of Houston native Goree Carter, whose 1949 single "Rock Awhile" has as strong a claim as any song to rock 'n' roll's first.

Johnny Ace should've sold Houston to the world, but Russian Roulette ended his career on Christmas Day 1954. And Duke/Peacock was largely confined to an R&B market, unable to cross over into pop.

"They straddled a weird line between jump blues and early rhythm and blues and the rock 'n' roll that was coming," says Jonathan Toubin, a popular DJ whose Soul Clap and Dance-Off draws crowds with old soul and R&B 45s. "They weren't the only one doing it. Chess and King were two other labels who may have done it better. But they were a distinctive company and an under-appreciated company with a great body of work."

By the 1960s Robey's operations began to shift toward gospel, while other music institutions like Motown and Stax took parts of his self-contained model and reached beyond R&B listeners for a multi-cultural audience. A new generation of musicians in Houston began to cut their teeth in this era at clubs like the storied one owned by Jimmy Menutis, and then they dispersed.

Photo: Houston Chronicle File

Johnny Nash signs autographs at Houston’s Ryan Junior High in 1969.

Johnny Nash signs autographs at Houston’s Ryan Junior High in 1969.

Mark James, who would write "Suspicious Minds" and "Hooked on a Feeling," settled in Memphis. So did B.J. Thomas, who transformed from a regional star into a national star. Johnny Nash traveled to Jamaica and England to record international hits.

"The talent was here in Houston, but the organization wasn't," Tyrell says. "So some great artists went elsewhere."

A great music townLast month a young Houston singer made a strong impression on "The Voice."

When Sundance Head finished his song, the show cut to his children and parents backstage.

"Voice" viewers likely didn't recognize Roy Head, whose hit "Treat Her Right" was a No. 2 pop single in 1965, kept from the top only by a Beatles tune.

Music history is a chicken/egg story. Some seek definitively which came first, which is an all-consuming query with no answer. Others assume today's chicken just showed up. Sundance Head's "Voice" appearance was two minutes long, and informed by a more than one lifetime of history.

Roy Head and the Traits — a top-shelf live band — barnstormed this region for years. He was a beloved white soul singer in the '60s, who recorded for Robey and Meaux. Yet these days he's lost in the shadow of his son.

Photo: handout

Roy Head in 1979.

Roy Head in 1979.

Without a functional museum, the past becomes increasingly vaporous. Fortunately a few local people interested in the past have worked to capture some of Houston's musical history.

Roger Wood — who will be a panelist at the conference this weekend — has written a trilogy of essential books: One on the city's blues community, one on its role in the creation of zydeco and one on SugarHill/Gold Star recording studios.

The University of Houston has become active in archiving the city's hip-hop scene, a grassroots phenomenon with worldwide acclaim that occurred without outside interference from the industry in New York and Los Angeles. Staffers at the Screwed Up Records and Tapes — opened by the late DJ Screw — say foreign tourists pop into the store weekly.

And Da Camera, the local arts organization and music programmer, has worked with the contemporary jazz star Jason Moran on a homecoming residency — a period where the New York-based pianist investigates his roots here. At 41, Moran falls in the middle of a river of alumni from the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts who graduated and left Houston for New York's jazz scene. The list of players is long, and their credits far-flung in pop and R&B as well as jazz.

Ottenweller's conference will touch on all this music and more. Still, she says, "I'm grieving for the genres we're not touching enough. To be frank, it's hard for a truly volunteer-run organization with $20,000 in the bank to pull off something this big. It has taken tireless work by dozens of people to make this happen."

Given the breadth of Houston's acreage no single landmark would necessarily lend itself to a cultural epicenter like Memphis has with Beale Street or New Orleans' French Quarter. A multi-million-dollar museum could turn out to be a financial failure, considering Houston isn't an entertainment tourism destination like either of those cities.

"Houston is really one of the best music towns in America, but it has been so bad at tooting its own horn," Toubin says. "So much happened there that people don't celebrate. Maybe other cities do more with music because it's all they have — so they base their economy on it. But Houston has a great history with music."

But an expanding population only underscores the value of cultural preservation. The transient present was fed by a transient past. And it had a big, broad sound.